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There’s No Such Thing As Over-Optimisation

I hear it over and over again - ‘Is our site over-optimised?’, ‘have we triggered an over-optimisation penalty?’, no, because there’s no such thing.

The very definition of ‘optimisation’ means that something cannot be over optimised.

What they actually mean is ‘have I spammed the hell out of my own website?’

Often when a page has a unusually high keyword density (I don’t believe in such a crude way of measuring keyword content, but it works here) you can very easily tell that it has been written primarily for search engines, humans second.  My thinking is if a page reads badly due to a spammy writing style, Google (in particular) will very easily pick up on this and rank the page accordingly.

So, the point I was making is that ‘over optimisation’ really means keyword stuffing / spamming, and that a page will never be penalised for being optimised, only for being spammy.